Gormongous

Yeah, that was the line, and it sounds to me like, "We want the PC money but we don't want to gut the console development or sales in order to get it, so it can wait."

Congratulations! It's great to hear. Do you want to regale us with your ultimate build? Regarding tail weapons, I got them all in NG and then tried to do the same in NG+. The only two I decided weren't worth it were Seath and Kalameet, the former because it's so hard to hit the tip of his tale in that small chamber and the latter because I tanked him for forty minutes straight without him putting his tail down in reach of my claymore so I said fuck it. I actually ended up chopping off Seath's tail by accident after giving up, but Kalameet's tail is so not worth it. None of the dragon tails are, except for charm points, because they're so heavy and don't scale. The Everlasting Dragon tail is a lark for how cool it looks, at least.

I like the miniseries version a lot, actually, but mostly for the performances. A few of the actors really capture their characters, even among the incongruously Slavic Fremen. I do know that the director said he was only interested in making faithful adaptations, so they'd stop after Children of Dune, because a faithful adaptation of such a high-flown and inward-looking book would be impossible

I'm quoting this for truth. The amazing thing about Dune is that it was written by someone deeply into the social, cultural, and mystical dimensions of religion in a time when those dimensions were something to be interested in. Nowadays, science fiction is caught up in the culture war throughout the Western world and therefore isn't really interested in anything besides deconstructing it. Comparing that to the earnestness of the Zensunni Fremen and the intensity of the quotes from the Orange-Catholic Bible makes it easy for me to see which I like more. About seven years ago, I made the decision to track down a copy of the Dune Encyclopedia, an in-universe compendium of terms and trivia. It was actually hard to get for less than a lot of money, allegedly because Brian Herbert has discouraged its sale and resale for how it contradicts his later novels. The author, a friend of Frank Herbert, poses as an academic collecting random knowledge following the Scattering, so it retains the same allusiveness (and elusiveness) of the books. He dismisses some entries, ignores others, and gives a very real feel for the information that remains.

I don't think Merus is making that argument. I think he might possibly be making the argument that Idle Thumbs took over a hundred episodes and almost five years to have a female guest who wasn't an interviewee, and the shitty part about an institutionalized culture of sexism is that I didn't even realize it until I had to read his comment again to respond to yours. There's no blame in this, but it is a weird thing that we should all work on.

It's deeply disliked, except as fan camp. Lynch himself pulled an Alan Smithee in some cuts, though I'm not sure why not all.

I'm very fond of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I don't think they deserve any of the dismissal they're seeing in this thread. God Emperor of Dune is much more challenging but still full of the weird and interesting ideas that make Herbert's writing so great. The last two are kind of going off and doing their own thing, but the promise there is still very real, like Rodi said.

I guess I misstated other people's complaints. Almost every reviewer noted that every set of choices had a downside except the extremities of liberal democracy. Basically, the only way to get long-term stability is to grow your government as big as your tax base will allow, because there's no modelling for inefficiency or corruption. While my beliefs also tend in the direction of the developer, I don't like that a technocratic welfare state is the only way to "win" the game, much less that Cliffski has flatly said in RPS comment threads and elsewhere that he designed it that way and is not interested in supporting other political ideologies.

It spoils it none at all. Jodorowsky never read Dune and at the point of filming is weirdly proud of it. In fact, I think the only person who actually read Dune and was part of the production was Amanda Lear. I also tend to like brilliantly unfinished works, so the incredible conclusion toward which Herbert was clearly building in his planned nine-or-so books makes everything after Children of Dune interesting for different reasons.

I like this thread as a "please try your hardest to sell me on or dissuade me from this game" thing on request. Also, I would like someone to make a hard pitch for or against Consortium, too. I think the Daft Souls podcast had a bit on it, I think, where they said it was consistently and deeply interesting, but not whether it was good or fun or anything that'd make me buy such a peculiar-sounding game. I took your review in line with some general forum buzz about where the game's going and decided to wait. I really appreciate it, though! Democracy 3 is going on my wishlist and, pending some deepening mechanics that are surely coming via DLC, I'll buy it come winter or something.

Yeah! I think the main problem with EU4, and one with which I think you'll agree, is that Paradox still feels obligated to make a war something you can win. Not only that, they feel obligated to make it something you can win on a sliding scale, making some wars bigger wins than others. So long as wars exist in games so that one side wins and the other loses, they are going to be exploitable, and not in the way wars are actually exploitative. The way I would like to see it done, and this isn't going to happen with the Europa Universalis series because it's way too married to the state-as-war-machine model of simulated governance, is that war is really and truly the last resort. It's the sort of thing that gets you a tiny scrap of profit in exchange for mutually assured destruction. It's the sort of thing where you exhaust every other possible option because they all have a better cost-benefit ratio than full-blown war. It's the sort of thing where you peace out as soon as you achieve your objectives because no possible bonus could offset the malus of continuing the war. Basically, I'm saying it would be nice to move past the American experience in World War II, which has shaped much of our culture and policy, that war is good for business and, so long as you win, it's the best possible thing that can happen to a nation.

Yeah, my issue is more with the implicit black-and-white narrative that everyone hated Far Cry 2, so they made Far Cry 3 and everyone was happy forever. Granted, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's really weird to see Far Cry 3 being pushed as a supremely solid design that only needs slight iteration. Then again, that's what the big companies, especially Ubisoft, do: try gameplay formulas until one works, then build an entire franchise around slight derivations of that formula.

Not that everyone has the time, but if you're going to read any of the Culture books, you should try to read the first three. Consider Phlebas is big and rambling and honestly in need of another editorial pass, but at the same time is crazy and grand and big-hearted in a way that only Banks could be. Player of Games is so much more smart and collected, but also a little unambitious and tight in its focus. And then Use of Weapons is beautiful, one of the best books I've read and the height of the Culture series. I can't imagine experiencing them any other way, especially how someone might read Surface Detail or The Hydrogen Sonata and work backwards.

Yeah, I had the same thoughts from the episode. Creative Assembly's put an enormous amount of effort into Total War: Rome II post-release, but that's really just moved it from "embarrassingly unplayable" to "just not fun to play". Once in a while, they pull together something that's at least enjoyable, like Rome: Total War or Total War: Shogun 2, but by and large they have a terrible track record of living up to even explicit promises. That said, I can understand someone who doesn't know them well having a positive impression. They know how to put on a good demo at shows, so if that's all you ever see of their games, it's understandable to think of them as a Firaxis-tier company, but between their reach always exceeding their grasp, their tendency towards throw-features-in-a-bucket-and-call-it-a-game design, and SEGA's tendency to push games out at least six months before they're done, I have trouble thinking that fondly of them. They haven't made a really solid game since the 2D days of Shogun and Medieval, which makes it kind of weird that they can just hang around in gamers' consciousness as this really talented and promising developer.

I could have sworn I went back to the first "arena" and Seath was gone, but maybe I just imagined it myself once I read that the first fight is unwinnable, because what would be dumber than having an invincible "boss" waiting there to kill you over and over? Yeah, deeper into the Archives and into the Caves. If you're not interested in exploring, the path to Seath is actually pretty quick and straightforward. New Londo is the same, once you drain the water.

But even that's not a very profound statement. Every sequel has a larger audience than the one before, it's why franchises are such a thing.

Thanks, guys! Nah, my processor is forty-five degrees on idle and sixty under load. The case itself is cooler than it was with my old card, which was a monstrous GTX 470. Drivers are clean as can be. If there's something secretly installed, it's not visible with any utility of which I know. I have spent a lot of time in the performance monitor and parsing process trees, though. CPU usage is always under twenty percent, but RAM weirdly spikes well above fifty at random moments. Looking at my hard drive stats, it's all just system process like Superfetch writing to and reading from the hard drive, though they're all a bit fatter and more active than I remember them being in the past. No obvious culprits, none that make my computer behave as if I'm always installing some massive piece of software. EDIT: Yeah, just watching the performance and resource monitors over the past day or so, I can see huge spikes in CPU, RAM, and hard drive usage almost at random and with no one program responsible. There's obviously some serious corruption deep in the system that's making Windows behave so strangely, I can only hope that a format will fix it. Now to find someone to burn me a disc...

Glad to hear it, Jon! Okay, I could use someone's opinion, no matter how superficial. As you know, my graphics card melted down last week. I replaced it, under less-than-perfect circumstances, then dealt with the seriously corrupted Windows build that came of it. I'm almost certain I found and fixed all the problems there too, but my computer continues to run extremely slow. By that, I mean it's "time for another stick of RAM because it's 2000 and Baldur's Gate II is coming out this fall" slow. I can use it for basic word processing and web browsing, but really nothing else, which is absurd when it's an i7 overclocked to four gigahertz with eight gigs of RAM. It takes fifteen seconds just to pull up the Control Panel screen. Running an F3 search through the registry takes a quarter of an hour. CPU- and GPU-heavy tasks like decoding 10-bit .mkv videos go alright, but there's a definite hitch even loading a hundred-megabyte file into memory. Anyway, I've decided that the solution is probably just to format. I've tested the hard drive, the memory, and the power supply, none of which came up with anything. My RAM made it through eighteen hours of MemTest86, which surprised even me. Unless my new graphics card is broken in some obscure and perverse way, there's not a single piece of hardware that's at fault. Then again, neither is Windows, according to the diagnostics I've run. The .NET framework corruption is gone, the event viewer is empty, and I've rebuilt the registry and the system files, so there's nothing there that should be causing a system-wide slowdown either. On paper, my Windows install is like new. I'm much more sure that the Windows diagnostics is missing something than the hardware diagnostics are, but I'm still fighting a lot of doubt. I'm in between things right now, so formatting is extremely inconvenient and will involve an intentional loss of data. I'd hate to go through the effort of doing it and then find the slowdown still there. Someone has to have more experience than my own two self-taught decades who can agree with me, or at least tell me why I'm wrong, to make this a bit easier. I'd really appreciate it if so.

I don't have an answer. Instead, I have a question of my own. I'm being tempted by Democracy 3 on the Steam sale, though I know I shouldn't be. I like the promise, the interface, and the sandbox design, but I hear from some reviewers that it is extremely easy and heavily weighted towards a liberal democracy as the only viable form of government. I don't know, I can see it being good, but I know it's probably just me imagining the best version of such a game. I'm not against games that are easy to master, if Crusader Kings 2 tells me anything, but there has to be something under the surface. Does anybody want to sell me on it?

I agree. "Moon" and "wizard" are two words that have barely if ever been said in any incarnation of Idle Thumbs. To include them together on a shirt would be pointless and confusing.

I had to try literally a dozen times to log into my account before it accepted what was the right username and password. I think the servers are still buckling, there was a little while an hour or so back where the search function wasn't even returning anything.

I love Trish and Gerald. Romance of the century, right?

Yeah, the fact that I have watched a friend play it and watched gameplay videos, but both look like hilarious Battlefield 4 mods, does not help arguments for a serious and systemic take on the issue.

It's a complicated series of causes and effects. Certainly, post-9/11 paranoia has produced a police force much more likely to resort to deadly force against any obstacle, even its own citizenry, but there are also several studies, both survey and laboratory, showing that police are drastically more likely to use the newest and most powerful part of their arsenal when confronted with any problem, rather than what policy or the situation demands. As dark as it is, it makes sense, in a way. Humans very rarely underreact when they feel threatened.

I really don't know. He'd had a sudden break with his fiancée near the end of the semester. He seemed in pain, of course, but dealing with it. Then I got an email from his mother this morning saying that he'd stopped returning her phone calls Sunday night, so I made some calls myself, stopped by, and knocked. No answer, but when I checked back later, the police were there and... yeah. We were close, but obviously not that close. It just all came out of nowhere. I'd even asked him at a department thing, exactly a month ago, about his mental health in very blunt terms, as I sometimes do. He said there was nothing to talk about. I don't know. It's a thing I'll need to work on living with. In the meantime, I appreciate the kind words.